For more than sixty years, celebrities have used their right of publicity to prevent others from making unauthorized commercial uses of their personas, most commonly in the form of a celebrity’s portrait, photograph or signature. Despite its importance to celebrities seeking to tightly control the appropriation of their likeness, the right of publicity occupies [...]

Before November 2, Alex Lee (Alex LaBeouf?) was a Texas teenager who happened to work at Target. Today, he is #alexfromtarget, a meme, and a microcelebrity with nearly 750,000 twitter followers. It is difficult to account for the precise mechanism that made Alex, or any meme, go viral. According to most [...]

On Halloween Thursday, Sam Moore, a Grammy-winning musician, lost his four-year litigation battle against The Weinstein Co. over the 2008 film Soul Men. Moore claimed that the film was a thinly-veiled rip-off of his music career and that the film’s accompanying soundtrack violated his trademark to “Soul Man.”

Harper Lee, the 87-year-old author of To Kill a Mockingbird, is suing a museum in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama to stop it from selling souvenirs with her name and the title of her Pulitzer Prize-winning book. The complaint alleges that the museum seeks to capitalize on [...]

Ed O’Bannon’s four-year-long lawsuit made a huge step a few weeks ago when O’Bannon and EA agreed on a settlement (previously discussed here). The settlement was a big win for the plaintiffs but also for student-athletes in general. It is one step closer to athletes being able to [...]

While some people have declared the National Collegiate Athletic Association (“NCAA”) system of governing student-athletes corrupt and in dire need of reform, the chances real change would in the NCAA has seemed . . . unlikely. The rule is simple: student athletes cannot receive any compensation for their performances on the field. [...]

President Obama’s reelection campaign, Obama for America, has recently settled a trademark dispute over its “Rising Sun” logo–the now famous “O” with red and white striped fields below a rising sun made of the open center space. The campaign trademarked the image in 2008 and also trademarked a similar logo in April of [...]